Telephone, Online and the Big Picture

Doug Church, Founding Partner, Phase 5 Consulting, Ottawa
Presented to the CARF Seminar - Market Research Surveys: Online Versus Traditional – Jan. 18, 2008

Doug Church summarizes the current debate over online versus telephone-based research by saying that, while online research offers definite advantages in terms of lower cost and quicker turn-around time, there remains a question of whether online can replace telephone for broadly-based surveys where probability-based sampling has traditionally been a requirement. He points out that penetration rates for online are generally lower than for telephone and online panels have been convened largely through self-selection because there is no Internet equivalent of the phone book to allow RDD-like sample recruitment. In an attempt to overcome some of the biases against Internet-based research, some suppliers are developing approaches such as propensity scores, non-response weighting, and bad responder controls in an effort to improve the quality of the output

Church contends that while the argument between the efficacies of online versus telephone-based research yields interesting debate, there is a much larger picture whereby people are becoming disengaged from the research process. Telephone response rates are dropping and online surveys are reaching a limited number of people. There is a looming crisis of supply that will affect the ability to generate quality results, regardless of the methodology.

At the same time, he contends that there is a shift in the control of the marketing model. Marketers can no longer exercise tight control of their message to the consumer because the Internet has changed the way people communicate through things like blogs and other avenues of consumer editorializing. This means that the marketing model is now more bottom-up than top-down. He posits that response rates and quality continues to be a challenge, in part because people are becoming more discerning about lending their time to organizations and that current approaches fail to engage them.

Addressing the bigger issues of supply and quality, regardless of the data collection mode, should the priority of the entire research industry. There are three points to consider:

• The supply crisis. Researchers need to find ways to better engage the people who do and don’t participate in research.

• Consumers expect to be empowered and approached differently. This requires the industry to move beyond the command and control model of research

• The industry needs to rethink some of the principles by which it has conducted research in the past, and seek better solutions that are aligned with the Internet era.